Symphony no. 2, op. 132 :"Mysterious mountain" : Lousadzak : op. 48
Alan Hovhaness
Musikk på CD Uten språklig innhold 2008
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| Omfang | 1 CD (1 t, 7 min) + bilag
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| Opplysninger | Nimbus records: NI2512. - Utgitt første gang i 1989. Musicmasters; MMD 60204. - American Composers Orchestra ; Dennis Russell Davies, dirigent ; Keith Jarrett, klaver. - Mysterious Mountain is the second of Hovhaness's sixty-seven symphonies. The Symphony is a work of long lines, smoothly surging and singing. It carries a redolence of Vaughan Williams' Fifth Symphony. The massed string choirs are to the fore and the music serves as a great anthem rolling high - sanguine, benign and muscular. This is a symphony about exaltation and that is the effect and the aim. The last of its three movements opens with a suggestion of the spatter of ice-cold rain and a great vorticial storm high amid towering peaks. The brass are allowed a momentary prominence before the return of the Tallis-like writing.Lousadzak is a single-movement piano concerto inspired by the Greek mystic painter, Hermon DiGiovanno. Here it is played by jazz composer-pianist Keith Jarrett. The style is very much that of the symphony. Here the massed strings also carry that middle-eastern sway and ululation. Elsewhere the music has the vigorous insistence of de Falla's Nights in the Gardens of Spain. The premiere was attended by Harrison and John Cage who were stunned by the work's freshness and originality and its total sever from anything else on the American musical arts scene. The performance is all you would hope for except that towards the end the strings take on a coarse hard edge which I suspect is down to the orchestra rather than the sound engineer. The Harrison connection takes us onto that composer's Elegiac Symphony. It was written in memory of Serge Koussevitsky and his wife Natalie. The essay by Tim Page is good. So this makes a welcome return to the catalogue for the music of two West Coast outsiders with a predilection for the East, arcana and lyricism." Rob Barnett, Musicweb-international.com Lou Harrison's remarkable Second Symphony is an ideal coupling for the Hovhaness Second. It creates the same feeling of space, only more intagibly, and its textures are comparably haunting. The work is superbly played, and stays in the memory long after the last two-note figure has become silent." The Penguin Guide
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